Panasonic has announced a partnership with Mozilla that will see Firefox OS utilised in future Smart TV sets.
Firefox OS is an open source Linux-based operating system predominantly aimed at smartphones and tablets, but Panasonic plans to bring it to your living room.
The lightweight OS’s strength with HTML5 and other web technologies is seen as a good fit for the always-connected Smart TV. It’s suggested that things like EPGs (Electronic Program Guides) and other menus that are normally baked into TV sets will now be written in HTML5, which would make it easy for developers to write apps for smartphones and tablets to remotely control those TVs.
It also opens up the possibility of more personalised and adaptable interfaces, which anyone who’s used a modern Smart TV will see as a blessing. It would also be easier for a Firefox OS TV to hook up with other smart devices around your home, effectively turning it into an entertainment hub.
With LG recently unveiling its new webOS-based television interface, it seems as if 2014 will be the year that TV manufacturers turn to the small screen for help in beating their unwieldy user interfaces into shape. And not before time, we’d suggest.
Panasonic doesn’t have any fresh Firefox OS-powered television hardware to show off at CES, which has just kicked off in Las Vegas, but it does suggest that we’ll see the first fruits of this partnership some time towards the end of 2014.
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